Sound & Spirit

Sound & Spirit links for:

Ghosts

These are some of the weblinks found as we did research for the program Ghosts. We thought you might find them interesting too.

Halloween

Holidays on the Net has an engaging Halloween site complete with ghosts and pumpkins, music and dancing skeletons. There's also cultural information about the holiday and its accoutrements - Visit with your kids and take home a virtual Jack-o-lantern!
Ben & Jerry's Halloween Page offers a Virtual Haunted House and a Flavor Graveyard. The ClassBrain.com's History of Halloween is an interesting article, as is this Q&A essay by Rowan Moonstone on The Origins of Halloween (complete with footnotes and a bibliography), which seeks to address what the author sees as "woefully inaccurate and poorly researched" pamphlets put out by various Christian organizations dealing with the origins of modern day Halloween customs.
Yes, like many of the sacred/secular holidays in the United States of America, Halloween is surrounded by some religious controversy. At Sound & Spirit we try our best to get to the root of some aspect of human experience and understand its significance. Sometimes this involves examining the opposing perspectives of two religious traditions. With regard to Ghosts, our Sound & Spirit Halloween Special, this was most definitely the case. For some Christian denominations, Halloween is a Pagan religious holiday and in the interests of religious purity and faithfulness they decide to avoid it and perhaps celebrate the traditional Christian All Souls and All Saints days instead. Some go further and condemn non-Christians' celebrations. Contemporary Neo-Pagans will then point out that they are celebrating a pre-Christian religious holiday, and that the Christian explanations of their holiday do not truly fit with their own Neo-Pagan understanding of what they are celebrating. Sound & Spirit offers you the opportunity to examine these opposing perspectives for yourself in hopes that if you are interested you will sort through them and draw your own conclusions.
A webpage addressing Halloween from a Christian perspective is offered by the Christian Broadcasting Network. This page tries to offer positive, Christian alternatives to celebrating Halloween. The Christian Broadcasting Network [CBN], was founded by fundementalist Christian evangelist Pat Robertson. You can see their perspectives on any number of topics in their Teaching Sheets Index.
Another, similarly opposing, Christian perspective can be found in On Halloween, a homily [sermon] coming from The Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Washington, D.C.
What Exactly Is Halloween?, an article from the October 31st, 1994 issue of Florida Today has been posted by The Church of the Iron Oak, Inc.. This group, a Wiccan/Pagan church, made national news in a small way when a "distant neighbor" of some of their members spied one of their private religious celebrations, called the police (who didn't respond, knowing that nothing was wrong), and then complained to the Palm City zoning commission. They were eventually exonerated, but at great expense to themselves, and to the city's tax-payers. You can read all about this misunderstanding in the Archives section of their website.

Samhain
A contemporary Neo-Pagan understanding and explanation of Halloween is offered by the Pagan Federation [An organization founded in Britain in 1971 in order "to provide information on Paganism and to counter misconceptions about the religion" and "to make Paganism accessible to people genuinely seeking a nature-based spiritual path".] Check their Introduction to see what they have to say about Celtic Neo-Pagan Seasonal Festivals and their calendar of religious holidays, the Wheel of the Year.
Widdershins - The Northwest's Finest Pagan Newspaper - Widdershins is a free Pagan newspaper based in the Pacific Northwest. It is published in print and on the World Wide Web eight times per year, just before each of the major Celtic Neopagan holidays. The nine Samhain Issues [Look them up in the Archive] have various articles of interest, about and relating to the holiday.

Días de los Muertos
The Day of the Dead (or the Days of the Dead) is a Mexican festival whose roots go back to pre-Hispanic times. But the underlying concepts are older even than the Aztecs. This site, Welcome to Mesoamerica, offers an introduction to the earliest cultures in the Valley of Mexico and beyond, which were preoccupied with the great cycle in which all living things die, go into the earth and then are reborn from it. For them, death was an aspect of life, and the "rituals of remembrance" that survive today in the celebration of the Day of the Dead reflect this understanding of the centrality of death in life.
What do Mexicans celebrate on the "Day of the Dead?" is a page of a website devoted to information about The Culture and Society of Mexico. It has great photographs and information about Dias de los Muertos. There are also pages about the food prepared for the picnics held by the graves of the loved ones, and information about the ancient Mayan and Aztec Calendars.

Bon Festival:
In Japan, Buddhists celebrate Obon or the Bon Festival: Three days in the middle of August (or September in rural areas) when their ancestor's spirits return to earth for a visit. Here are some websites that can give you an idea of just what the festival is like.
From Japan we have Hiroaki Katayama's Homepage where he bids us Welcome to Hiroshima and offers us information about Festivals - "Matsuri" and a Brief History of "Bon" Festival.
The Runker Room a Japanese Canadian's Homepage offers About Obon - a set of linked pages with photographs, information, links and a large Obon Q&A section.
In Hawaii, Kapi'olani Community College is home of the Hawaii Center for Japanese Instruction. There too you will find the KCC Japanese Culture Club. You can check out what they have to say about the Obon Festival.
The Shingon Buddhist International Institute provides an essay What is Obon? that fills us in on some of the religious background of the festival and offers a page of Obon Teachings.

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